What Would Cesar Chavez Do?
About once a month, two colleagues and I pile into a car a little after dawn, hop on the 8 and drive east. And we keep driving. Our destination is the Imperial Regional Detention Facility (IRDF) in Holtville — an isolated, privately run immigration detention center that’s a little over a two hour drive from here. It’s where more than 700 immigrants fighting to stay in this great country are locked up like criminals.
The ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties provides legal rights presentations to these detainees, trying to give them a modicum of support so they can be better armed to fight a deportation machine by themselves. Due to the facility’s remoteness, there are no pro bono lawyers and barely any private lawyers to provide the legal representation they so greatly need. This lack of representation means their chances of winning their cases and remaining in the United States decreases more than ten-fold.
I first started coming to the immigration detention center in this county about 10 years ago, when it was the ICE-run El Centro Service Processing Center. Names and structures may have changed since then, but not much else has. I’m still aghast at the abysmal level of legal representation, at the obliterated hope of those incarcerated there, at the feeling of pure desperation that pervades the air.
They are Somali asylum seekers who have fled their villages from warlords and radicalized thugs, and who have travelled through all of Africa, into and through the Americas and Mexico on a dangerous months-long journey to present themselves at our border and ask for the protection of the United States, only to be welcomed with placement into an incarceration factory.
They are Central American women escaping rape and cartel violence, who have left loved ones and all things familiar behind to brave La Bestia in desperation for peace and security, only to be tossed behind concrete walls and barbed wire fences in color-coded jumpsuits that communicate that they are something less than human in the eyes of our government.
They are long time U.S. residents who the US is trying to deport and separate from their families, held far from any loved ones and children, who now face the likelihood of growing up without a father or mother.
None are serving time there for a crime of any kind. They have traveled through different worlds and walked different paths to get here, but all have ended up in this bleak, and highly secured, place.
Our monthly two-hour journey to the facility may pale by comparison to theirs, but the trek in many ways also traverses through different worlds. Metropolitan San Diego gives way to suburban homes of El Cajon, which then give way to Alpine and the Cleveland National Forest. Then we pass through the La Posta and Campo Indian Reservations, past the towering blades of the Kumeyaay wind farm, eventually passing so close to Mexico that our phones inform us that we have in fact left the U.S. We start climbing through moonscapes of the In-Ko-Pah mountain range before finally dropping, suddenly, to below sea level and the flat expanse of agricultural fields that make up so much of Imperial County.
Today is Cesar Chavez day. And no, it’s not a day to celebrate the greatest Mexican fighter of all time, as I thought when I heard about him as an Iranian kid growing up on the east coast where the day wasn’t celebrated, but rather, it’s a day to honor one of the greatest American fighters of all time. Cesar Chavez was a pioneering civil rights activist, who spent his life fighting to secure improved wages and conditions for farm workers throughout California and the United States. He was born in Yuma, which is just another 45 minutes down the road, and much closer — geographically and culturally — to Holtville than San Diego.
Chavez worked, organized, protested, and marched in fields just like these. Whether you know it or not, he has had an impact on your life in so many ways, including the daily produce you eat that was farmed by workers who were protected by the rights he helped obtain. His spirit is captured in the phrase he made famous — “Sí se puede!” — which is still ubiquitous in protests today and which President Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign anglicized and appropriated.
We are the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. This is not something that is lost on anyone who works here. But the needs in our two counties are vastly different, and the rights abuses we hear about from Imperial County sometimes feel like they came out of a time machine. As we drive through these fields on our way to IRDF, it’s hard not to think about Cesar Chavez, who dedicated his life to helping some of the poorest and most desperate workers in America achieve a better life, and wonder what he would think.
What would Cesar Chavez say if he heard about El Centro Sector Border Patrol’s rampant abuses and lack of accountability? What would he do if he saw video of Ralph Sampson being beaten to death by El Centro PD officers, who actually called their dispatch to ignore his family’s pleas to send medical attention? What would he think if he heard about Guillermo Hernandez being snatched from a courthouse and locked up in a detention center away from his husband Tom, a disabled veteran? What would he do if he learned that, along with Guillermo, 700 other poor, desperate people were locked up near his birthplace, against their will, not for breaking any laws but for seeking peace and security in the greatest country in the world?
As we provide our legal rights presentations and gaze upon the desperate faces listening intently, I wonder what a fearless civil rights warrior like Chavez would do. Would he organize? Would he fight for them? Would he show the world the indignities these human beings are suffering? Would he shame the country into improving their plight? I really don’t know. I’m just an Iranian kid from the east coast who’s trying to do a little good in this world. But those are the things I intend to do. Sí se puede.
